A strong histrionic vein mixes, too, with his more
imaginative mental qualities, and perpetually reveals itself in his
assumption of fictitious characters, in his desire for producing
"situations" in his daily life, and in his conscious "effects" upon
those whom he sought to impress.
His genius sometimes reminds me of Ariel--the subtle spirit who,
observing from aloof, as it were (that is, from the infinite distance of
his own _unmoral_, demoniacal nature), the follies and sins and sorrows
of humanity, understands them all and sympathizes with none of them; and
describes, with equal indifference, the drunken, brutish delight in his
music expressed by the coarse Neapolitan buffoons and the savage
gorilla, Caliban, and the abject self-reproach and bitter, poignant
remorse exhibited by Antonio and his fellow conspirators; telling
Prospero that if _he_ saw them he would pity them, and adding, in his
passionless perception of their anguish, "I should, sir, _were I
human_."
There is a species of remote partiality in Goethe's mode of delineating
the sins and sorrows of his fellows, that seems hardly human and still
less divine; "_Das ist daemonisch_," to use his own expression about
Shakespeare, who, however, had nothing whatever in common with that
quality of moral _neutrality_ of the great German genius.
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